David E. Davis Jr.: On Collecting

Journalism, for my friend, was literature collection.

A while back, I celebrated my 80th birthday and resigned myself to my new status as an advanced-bladder-cancer patient. The chemotherapy began almost immediately, and my wife is quite willing to share any insulting anecdotes about “chemo-brain” in my daily routine. I would rather die with cancer than of it, and it was my great good fortune to count Car and Driver’s late road-test editor, André Idzikowski, among my best friends. André suffered from cancer most of his life, and his famous grumpiness was neatly tempered by a very good sense of gallows humor.

There is also my friend Mickey Alterman—father of Eddie—who is as funny as anyone I know, and who only recently completed his own treatment for this disease and has been returned to everyday society with a clean bill of health.

There is one other: Ronald “Steady” Barker, who is about my age and likes to arrive at British motorsports events standing on top of old biplanes as a wing walker, not unlike America’s air-show barnstormers between World Wars I and II.

Last year, I finished my second book, a lush coffee-table biography of the enthusiast/collector Bud Lyon. (My first was autobiographical. I called it Thus Spake David E.) I want to write one more book, if possible. The stories need telling. I will call it Doctor Menudo’s Miracle Ten-Day Cancer Cure. It will sell like a book by Oprah Winfrey, I will become indecently wealthy, and the readers will be halfway through its pages before they notice that it’s about cars, not cancer cures.

This column is about a similarly afflicted friend of mine who always had the right press credentials and wrote stirring stuff about fast drives in inaccessible automobiles without much actual attention to the journalism part. Hans Tanner was Swiss. He seemed to be on hand for every major press event. He knew anyone who was important in the field, and he seemed to aspire as much to be a sort of “go-to fixer” between the small builders and suppliers in sports-car meccas like Modena and the wealthy American innocents who regularly appeared on the European scene to show the locals how it was done.

Once, over a handsome breakfast on a snowy New England morning, he told me that his grandfather was a Swiss farmer, who, on mornings like that one, would stand barefoot in fresh cow manure in order to keep warm.

Journalism, for Hans, was literature collection. “Please give me all of the press packets and all of the new sales brochures. And put me on the list for the ride with Phil Hill. Is there a gift?” He was also a finagler. If some expatriate American was considering a season of Formula 1 or major-league sports-car racing in Europe, Hans would appear in his life like a long-lost relative: “Yes, I know those people. I can get that engine for you. They were very helpful when I wrote my Ferrari book.” But those who knew Hans and had seen these projects blow up in the past, waited with bated breath for the prospective client to lose patience. The British journalists of the Tanner era called his work “cock books” because they were all “poppycock.”

In the meantime, he was steadfastly stiff-arming the management of the Hotel Albergo Real in Modena, ignoring requests for at least token payment against his ballooning bill. He resolved his financial disagreement with hotel management by doing a midnight flit. When next I saw him, he was living in a caretaker’s apartment on an estate belonging to Bob Said, father of NASCAR driver Boris Said and an aspiring expatriate driver in his own right. Hans’s pleasant, compliant Cuban girlfriend made lovely breakfasts for us, and the air was filled with vague boasts about her father’s role as a right-wing mastermind in Cuba’s latest revolution and Hans’s work as an anti-Castro operative in deep cover.

On one occasion, he brought out an elaborately decorated Cuban dictionary or encyclopedia and opened it to show me the clever way in which a Model 1934 Mauser 7.65-mm automatic pistol had been concealed therein.

That pistol returned to haunt me when I learned that Hans had killed his girlfriend with something similar, before killing himself, in 1975. He had a leukemia-like cancer and had evidently convinced himself that it was beyond the ability of the specialists available through the insurance from his employer (Petersen Publishing in Los Angeles at that time)—or, more likely, he’d simply never bothered to enroll.

His books are read like the gospel by impressionable beginners in the car hobby. And he is well regarded in the ranks of the Ferrari Owners Club for his good work in helping to redevelop the Virginia City Hill Climb in 1972. He might have made a great multimillionaire, but there was a dominant small-time hustler gene in his makeup.

I liked Hans Tanner. I’ve always been drawn to lovable scoundrel types. We had a shared interest in exotic automobiles and exotic firearms. My advantage is that I did a lot of driving and a lot of shooting, and I still do.

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